Corporate governance is usually described as what regulators require. That description undersells it. Controls, reporting lines, and independent oversight let the people funding a company see how it actually works, which is why, for Anna Rudaia, business growth and governance are the same conversation
Anna Rudaia: Business case for corporate governance as a growth strategy
In Rudaia’s experience, founders who haven’t worked inside a corporate structure can read corporate governance as overhead. Committees, paperwork, a drag on the product. She understands where that reaction comes from.
Early-stage companies live on speed, and anything that adds another review, another meeting or another layer of approval can look like something that takes that speed away.
The second reason is quieter and more convincing. Rudaia has seen how early-stage companies can go for some time without formal governance and without an obvious consequence. They reach the next round, look back, and find no failure they can trace directly to what was missing. That makes governance easier to postpone.
Her own starting position was different. In regulated markets, governance isn’t a decision you postpone to Series B. The regulator mandates it, every stakeholder expects it, and it is in place from day one.
Rudaia argues that the constraint turned into an advantage: once you stop arguing about whether the mechanisms are worth it and build them into the foundation, the discipline comes free with them.
What that discipline buys is decision quality. Without governance, management mostly reacts. A risk lands, and the response gets assembled afterwards from whatever is available. With it, the same risk reaches a discussion while there are still options on the table, which is the difference between managing a company and explaining one.
That framing isn’t hers alone. The G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance are written to help build a framework that supports market confidence, economic efficiency and financial stability, none of which reads like paperwork.
That gap shows up in due diligence. A company that can show how decisions get made, who reviews them and what happens when something goes wrong is easier for an investor to price, because there is less left to guess at.
Moving beyond compliance
Compliance answers a question someone else asked. Governance by design starts earlier, with regulatory and ethical considerations built into the architecture of a process rather than checked against it once the process exists. Rudaia names this as the principle that shaped her approach most.
The difference shows up in timing. A compliance mindset waits for the issue, then panics and retrofits. Design means the constraint is already in the shape of the thing, so nobody has to choose later between what works and what passes.
COSO made the same move in 2017: its updated enterprise risk management framework foregrounds risk inside the strategy-setting process and in driving performance, rather than treating it as a separate exercise.
Designing it also changes what prevention is worth. Avoid a regulatory action, a penalty or the reputational damage that follows, and the saving is a real number rather than a feeling. Once it can be calculated, the argument for these mechanisms stops being ideological and starts being budgetary.
Governance as a competitive advantage, in Anna Rudaia’s experience
Premium partners check a potential partner thoroughly before signing, so a company that can demonstrate controls and clean reporting gets through those checks faster than one still assembling answers. The same holds for distribution deals, where an established institution has to satisfy itself before putting its network behind an unfamiliar product.
At the development-finance end of the market this is institutionalised. IFC runs a corporate governance analysis on every investment transaction it makes, using a progression matrix to assess how a company performs against its governance parameters. What a founder treats as internal housekeeping is, on the other side of the table, part of the assessment.
The same calculation runs at the individual level. Senior advisors and independent directors put their own reputation behind a company for a few hours a month, and they look at how a company runs before they agree. For them, it is a reputational decision rather than a commercial one, which is where stakeholder trust actually gets tested: not in what a company says about itself, but in what people are willing to attach their name to.
In regulated markets, the advantage is easier to price. A review that closes without findings is a penalty not paid, and the same record is read again at the next licence upgrade or market entry. Rudaia’s argument is that the mechanisms mostly pay for themselves in what they prevent, which is harder to argue in advance than a revenue forecast and easier to check afterwards.
Transparency as the foundation of trust
Every one of those advantages depends on something being visible to the other side. Rudaia defines that visibility narrowly enough to act on.
A transparent company can say why it exists, what it is doing to get where it claims to be going, and what is happening right now, including the parts that aren’t working. Anything softer than that is presentation.
For Anna Rudaia, management starts inside the company, because business transparency changes what employees think the job is. Her observation is that people who know the real position start solving problems rather than completing tasks.
In her practice, that gets measured: engagement surveys run roughly every six months. Two of the questions ask whether a person feels their work contributes to the business and whether the company’s purpose means anything to them.
Rudaia reports a correlation between how people answer those two questions and how they perform.
With investors the practice is to lead with the problem. Rudaia shares the challenge and the plan for it rather than waiting until it can be reported as solved, which is uncomfortable in the short term and useful later.
An investor who has watched a company describe bad news accurately is more willing to fund its entry into a new market, where the numbers don’t exist yet and the decision rests on the team.
Deloitte’s work on private company boards puts candour in the same bracket as attitude and behaviour, noting that independent thinking shared by people with different perspectives can promote a culture of transparency.
Partners want the same thing in a harder form. Documented processes, controls someone can inspect, a clear account of how the business actually runs. Show that, and the founder’s word stops being the only evidence available.
Balancing governance with business agility
That is where the tension between speed and control comes back into Rudaia’s argument. Her answer is that the two coexist perfectly well, and that the trade-off people describe is almost always a symptom of timing rather than of control itself.
The first mechanism is a governance framework built with the teams instead of handed to them. That starts with risk appetite: an agreed statement of how much risk the company is willing to carry, and where. It gets defined openly, reviewed on a schedule, and discussed alongside what would be done if a risk materialised.
Once everyone knows where the boundaries sit, risk management stops being a gate and starts being context. People decide inside their own area without checking whether they are allowed to.
The second is smaller, and by her account it has helped a great deal. Put the risk or compliance manager in the room from the discovery stage, before development starts.
They see what is being designed while it is still an idea, and they can say early that a particular approach will run into a standard or a regulatory requirement. The team adjusts the solution there and then, and the development pace holds.
The alternative is familiar. Product gets built in isolation, the compliance review happens just before release, and the verdict is that large parts have to be redone. That is another full iteration, more time, more budget, and a team that now associates governance with wasted work. The delay gets blamed on the control, when it was caused by the sequence.
Agility survives the framework. It rarely survives being audited at the end.
Leadership principles behind effective governance
Sequencing is a leadership decision, not a process detail. So is most of what makes governance work once the framework exists on paper.
Anna Rudaia’s perspective as a CEO starts with prevention, and specifically with making the case for it out loud. Sooner or later, someone asks why an hour a month goes into a risk metrics review instead of a feature. Rudaia’s position is that the answer should exist before the question does, because a mechanism whose value is visible is harder to quietly work around.
Prevention depends on someone looking at the numbers on a schedule. That is what the monthly risk metrics review is for: the mechanisms get checked while they are still working, not after something has gone wrong. Governance fails quietly when a risk is everybody’s concern and nobody’s calendar.
Process transparency does similar work internally. Rudaia’s point about communicating why a mechanism exists applies to decisions as well: when people understand how something was decided, disagreement stays technical. When they don’t, they start reading motives instead.
Trust decides how much of this is real. Rudaia works with independent directors precisely because they sit outside daily operations and bring a perspective the executive team can’t. That only pays off if they get the actual picture, weak points included, early enough to strengthen something before it breaks. A leader who curates what the board hears gets advice on a company that doesn’t exist.
One thread runs through all of it. Rudaia’s own examples are about what a leader keeps doing when nobody is checking: explaining the value of a control, looking at the metrics on schedule, telling the board what it does not want to hear. The standard follows from what a leader does repeatedly, not from what gets announced.
Corporate governance in practice: Seven working principles
Strip out the reasoning and seven principles carry most of the load.
- Transparency. Say where the company actually stands, including the quarters that disappoint. Anything softer is presentation.
- Accountability. Every risk and every metric has a named owner who explains the movement and acts on it.
- Governance by design. Build regulatory and ethical constraints into the architecture of a process, not into a review at the end of it.
- Risk management. Define risk appetite with the teams and review it on a schedule, so boundaries work as context rather than as a gate.
- Stakeholder trust. Decisions that an outside party can follow are easier to back than decisions that have to be taken on trust.
- Strategic oversight. Independent directors are worth their seat only when they see the weak points early, which means seeing them unedited.
- Continuous improvement. Frameworks get reviewed like anything else. A mechanism that has stopped doing work gets replaced, not defended.
Governance earns its place at the point where it changes decisions. A company that knows who owns which risk, reports where it stands without editing, and builds its constraints before anyone asks walks into funding rounds and partnership talks already answering the questions its competitors are still assembling. The advantage gets measured in months not spent explaining yourself. Trust accumulates the same way, out of behaviour that can be checked rather than values printed on a wall. Anna Rudaia‘s position comes down to that: a company that governs itself well is a company that decides well, and the rest follows.
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